Only about 4 percent were acquired or went public with a unicorn valuation of $1 billion or more. These included General Motors buying Cruise Automation for $1 billion, Twilio going public with a market cap of $1.2 billion and Cisco Systems buying Jasper Technologies for $1.4 billion.

Marquee acquisitions like Cruise and Jasper have increased during the tech IPO drought of the past year or so, but remain rare, Josh Elman of Greylock Partners said last week.

“That is increasing but it’s really only the strong companies that are getting acquired,” Elman said. “The acquihire market, where every team is worth something, has been falling away.”

It’s easy to see why they say that launching a successful tech startup is hard when you consider all of those numbers in the context of this rule of thumb — between 90 percent and 95 percent of them fail to achieve any sort of exit at all.

But the CB Insights report shows that it may not be necessary to do any venture visits to Sand Hill Road to sell a tech startup for millions or even tens of millions.

About 72 percent of the companies that exited in the first half did so without raising any outside venture, private equity or growth funding. That’s actually down slightly from the first half of last year when the number was 75 percent.

Cromwell Schubarth is TechFlash Editor at the Silicon Valley Business Journal.